White Gay Men Are Hindering Our Progress as a Queer Community

By Gabriel Arana

November 09, 2017

You had your time — now, we have other things to fight for.

At this year’s Pride Parade in Washington, D.C., there was not only pride but also conflict.

As revelers strolled down P Street toward Logan Circle at around 5:30 p.m. on June 10, a chain of demonstrators handcuffed together spread along 15th Street to halt them, anchored to a railing at one end and a car at the other. Radical protest group No Justice, No Pride had come to stop the party.

“What side are my people? What side are you on?” chanted other members of the group, which consists of “black, brown, queer, trans, gender nonconforming, bisexual, indigenous, two-spirit, formerly incarcerated, disabled, [and] white allies.”

As LGBT editor at ThinkProgress Zack Ford reported at the time, protesters not participating in the blockage handed out pink flyers enumerating their demands. Chief among them: the expulsion of D.C. police and corporate sponsors like Wells Fargo, which has come under fire for helping to finance the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor and weapons manufacturer. “Capital Pride will honor the legacy of Pride and the trans women of color who inspired it by ensuring that trans women of color play a central role in decision-making processes,” began the list.

The partygoers were not pleased. As the parade backed up at a turn two blocks back, spectators jeered from balconies overhead. Others flipped protesters the bird and shouted, “Shame!”

"Fuck you for ruining a nice parade!" yelled a blond older guy from the sidewalk, who then made an abortive attempt to start a counter-chant: “No respect, no pride!”

No Justice, No Pride and Black Lives Matter–affiliated groups reprised the protest in cities across the country throughout the summer.

The Capital Pride confrontation and others like it have laid bare a growing chasm within the LGBTQ+ community between older activists and younger; between gay white cisgender men who feel like they can celebrate post-marriage equality and those who fear for their lives under a Trump administration; between those whose biggest stumbling block in life is being gay and those who feel their freedom is contingent not only on LGBTQ+ rights but also on issues like police reform, reproductive rights, and economic inequality. It is, in sum, a rift between the intersectionalists and the non-intersectionalists.

As Marc Stein, a professor of LGBTQ+ history at San Francisco State University said about our current era, “‘Intersectionality’ has become the buzzword.”

Intersectionality and Its Discontents

First coined by the American scholar and civil rights activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989, the term “intersectionality” posits that people experience oppression on multiple, “intersecting” fronts, and that activism focused narrowly on, say, LGBTQ+ rights will fail to address the needs of someone who is, for instance, transgender, black, and a woman. Even if the LGBTQ+ movement wins all its goals, that black trans woman will continue to suffer the consequences of racism and sexism, which include crippling poverty and pervasive discrimination. Critics like New York magazine’s Andrew Sullivan have dismissed intersectionality as a neo-Marxist “academic craze” and a form of secular religion. But for its advocates, intersectionality is a way of centering those who’ve been historically at the margins of the LGBTQ+ community, whose interests were little served by the arrival of marriage equality.

“Sexism and racism are not just additive, but multiplicative,” said Jillian Weiss, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund. Weiss said that in order to liberate all members of the LGBTQ+ community, it is necessary to elevate those with the least privilege. “Intersectionality is absolutely crucial to our movement — it’s not just one thing at a time that we need to fight.”

An activist, poet, and grad student at the University of California, Berkeley, Alan Pelaez knows this firsthand.

“The way I navigate the world as an undocumented immigrant is different, as a black queer body is different, [but] I experience these identities simultaneously,” said Pelaez, who has urged the LGBTQ+ movement to adopt an intersectional approach to advocacy. “Intersectionality is asking what kinds of privleges some LGBTQ community members have and who gets denied them.”

But as dustups caused by groups like No Justice, No Pride show — as well as other developments, like the addition of a brown stripe to Philadelphia’s LGBTQ pride flag; and scuffles over the inclusion of Israeli flags at demonstrations — that not everyone is happy with the LGBTQ+ movement’s focus on intersectionality, which has foregrounded discussions of privilege, police brutality, sexism, racism, and anti-trans violence.

Photo by Robyn Beck

Some gay white cisgender men are starting to tune out.

“You have gay white men who are no longer involved in activism or community work because they just get shouted down by minority activists who want to racialize everything,” said Jamie Kirchick, a right-leaning journalist and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. In a piece in Tablet magazine last year titled “How Intersectionality Makes You Stupid,” Kirchick took aim at the National LGBTQ+ Task Force, which canceled and then uncanceled a Shabbat reception at its annual Creating Change conference in response to critics of Israel.

“White gay man has become an epithet,” he added.

While the academic definition of intersectionality may be narrow, its meaning has broadened as its usage has spread across various social justice movements. Not only is it used as shorthand to talk about work between coalitions, it has also come to embody the idea that, as with the experience of identity, the sources of oppression — sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism — are interconnected. For the more radical, the ultimate oppressor is capitalism.

“I think what [the focus on intersectionality] does is bring everyone to rally around our victimhood, and that, fundamentally, is negative,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, now a political independent who co-founded gay Republican group the Log Cabin Republicans. “A bigger, more unifying message will resonate with more and more of Americans as we grow tired of the us-versus-them confrontation-style politics of the last couple of decades.”

Kirchick said intersectionality has made the work of some LGBTQ+ organizations incoherent, citing groups like Gays Against Guns, which sprung up after the Pulse massacre in Orlando last year.

“You can support gun control, but I don’t see what that has to do with being gay,” Kirchick said. “And the notion that gay-rights groups should be weighing in at all on [the] abortion issue is preposterous.”

Erasing Gay White Cisgender Men?

But even some progressive gay white men say they feel alienated from a movement they see becoming more radical, particularly online, where the tenor of conversation is often uncivil. Writing in The Nation in 2014, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg noted a similar dynamic emerging online between older feminists and younger ones who consider themselves intersectionalists.

One left-leaning political activist and writer, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisal, said he often gets shouted down on social media by intersectionalists decrying his “white privilege” and minimizing both his struggles and contributions to the movement. This includes downplaying the role of gay men in the 1969 Stonewall riots that kicked off the modern-day LGBTQ-rights era.

“People literally say that gay white men have done nothing for the movement for the last 50 years,” he said. “They’re not trying to make the movement intersectional; they’re trying to erase other participants who came before them.”

“A lot of people are staying on the sidelines just because of the intensity of the expected attacks,” said Walter K. Olson, a fellow at libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. “For a lot of people — even people who support [intersectionality] but may have a sticking point — they just feel they had better stay out of the conversation.”

But Olson, who is gay and married, added that the internal conflict the LGBTQ+ movement is currently experiencing — and the drop-off in participation from those at the top — was to be expected after marriage equality.

“Movements change after they win,” Olson said. “After victory, you will naturally lose a lot of your momentum.”

Olson provided himself as an example. A gay white married man, he said he “showed up for marriage and looked at issues that followed and stepped back out.” While he supports trans rights, he said he feels the battle is no longer his.

Another “Movement of Movements”

Older activists also believe that critiques of the LGBTQ+ movement’s inclusivity overlook past progress. Richard Rosendall, a columnist for the Washington Blade and a decades-long activist, said the LGBTQ+ movement in Washington, D.C., has always been allied with the racial-justice groups, given the city’s racial diversity. During the marriage fight, he worked with black faith leaders who supported gay marriage. The NAACP endorsed marriage equality at the time, which suggests that LGBTQ+ groups have often worked with other rights organizations to achieve its goals.

“To pretend there has been no progress on [race within the LGBTQ+ community] disincentivizes allyship,” Rosendall said.

While Rosendall generally supports intersectional approaches to activism, he penned a column criticizing No Justice, No Pride for interrupting D.C. Pride. He said protesting police presence at Pride overlooks decades of work spent improving relations between the D.C. LGBTQ+ community and the police force; the department even has an LGBTQ+ liaison and is considered a model for inclusion.

“There’s a risk of behaving in a totalitarian mindset,” he said.

Stein, the SF State historian, noted that the current debate within the LGBTQ+ movement over issues of inclusion — and what “justice for all” means — is reminiscent of what academics call the “movement of movements” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. United by the Vietnam War, it was an “incredible era of dialogue” between social-justice groups of starkly different stripes.

The Gay Liberation Front marched with the Black Panthers and participated in antiwar demonstrations. “Homophiles,” as they called themselves back then, took on issues like police reform at a time when law enforcement routinely entrapped gay men in stings. The movement was not only far more decentralized than today, when several large LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations with lots of money generally set the agenda; it was stacked with critics of capitalism, including communists like Harry Hay, who co-founded early homophile organization the Mattachine Society. In 1989, the first gay-pride march through Washington, D.C., featured a conference that tried to encourage coalitions between different racial groups; it was endorsed by the National Organization for Women and the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays.

To call the “movement of movements” intersectional would be an anachronism, but the banding together of different causes produced similarly contentious debates about who had power, whose issues should take precedence, and which coalitions made sense. Now, with President Donald Trump in the White House, intersectionalists are posing similar questions.

“This Is Not a Polite Thing”

To those experiencing oppression on several fronts — those at the intersections — the sensibilities of gay white cisgender men seem beside the point.

“I come from a place of anger — particularly on social media, where people who are oppressed talk about their embodied knowledge — but my anger is rooted in the fact that my human limits have been met,” said activist Pelaez, adding that the arrival of marriage equality did little to help his legal status. “Anger is generative and a source of empowerment. Only when we are angry can we do something to address what makes us angry.”

Lourdes Hunter, a black trans woman and the executive director of the TransWomen of Color Collective, put it more starkly.

“When black trans women are murdered in the street, it doesn’t happen in a polite manner,” said Hunter, an academic who has worked as an organizer for 25 years. Indeed, trans women of color are more frequently the victims of violence than any other group under the LGBTQ umbrella.

“This is not a polite thing,” Hunter said. “When someone has their foot on your neck, you don’t tap them and say, ‘Excuse me.’”

With Trump in office, the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ community feel that the need to speak out against threats forcefully is more critical than the need to engage in “respectability politics.”

“There are people who are undocumented, with disabilities, impacted by state-sanctioned violence in ways cisgender white queer people are not,” Hunter said. “With intersectionality, we’re talking about centering those voices that have been erased by cisgender white queers.”

“Sometimes the framework for the liberation of one group clashes with another,” Pelaez added, citing the rhetoric around immigration as an example. Public sympathy centers around Dreamers — undocumented Americans brought to the U.S. as children — and those who have committed no crimes. Linking citizenship with lack of criminality undermines the racial-justice movement’s critique of the way certain groups are presumed criminal and overpoliced.

“We use narratives about immigrants that implicate blacks,” he said. “I’m not going to be liberated because I am both black and an immigrant.”

The calls for politeness strike Darnell Moore, a writer and organizer with Black Lives Matter who identifies as queer and black, as “disingenuous.” He noted that AIDS activism in the 1980s and 1990s — in which gay men and their allies chained themselves to government buildings and performed die-ins on the streets of major cities — was hardly polite.

“So the only people who are allowed to be disruptive are white cisgender men?” said Moore, who called on LGBTQ organizations to endorse Black Lives Matter on HuffPost.

Our Allies, Our Selves

Not all gay white cisgender men see the LGBTQ+ movement’s intersectional turn in a negative light. Gay Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Sims said his experience as a gay white cisgender man — and the discrimination he has faced on account of his sexual orientation — has made him more sympathetic to the plight of members of the community who are more disenfranchised than he is.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as victimhood,” said Sims, who supported the addition of a brown stripe to Philadelphia’s pride flag. “We talk about the Obama years as a heyday for the gay movement. That’s not true for hundreds of thousands of LGBT people. It didn’t change the circumstances of trans women of color.”

Sims said it seemed obvious to him that sexism, racism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia come from the same place, and said that the far-right politics of the Trump administration have made intersectionality all the more important.

“If sharing a common enemy brings us together, the best thing that comes from this Dumpster fire of a presidency is that we are all learning that we can and should work together,” he said. “It doesn’t water down the [experience of gay white cisgender men] to hear about others’ struggles. It informs you to make better decisions.”

Imara Jones, an activist and journalist who identifies as black and nonbinary, said the current political moment is a turning point that calls for radicalism.

“I don’t believe the current structure of political power in the U.S. is going to last,” Jones said. “The question is whether there is going to be enough momentum to replace it with something that’s new.”

That depends on the degree to which those with more power in the LGBTQ+ family share it with those who have less, Jones said. To do this, gay white cisgender men have to not only let their guard down and listen but also acknowledge the relative power they wield and use it to elevate those lower down who have been historically marginalized.

“The key to justice is acknowledgment,” said Jones, who is currently at work on an intersectional news show for Free Speech TV. “White cisgender gay men have to acknowledge that they have a disproportionate amount of power in the movement that has accrued to them for historical reasons that are wrong.”

Pelaez concedes that “intersectional work is all about having really difficult conversations.” It is, after all, psychologically taxing for a gay white cisgender man who got bullied in high school for his sexual orientation and can still be fired for it in 28 states to hear about the privilege he has as a white man. But it’s necessary, Pelaez said.

“Why does it hurt you to hear about someone else’s experience that could help create a more just world?” Pelaez asked.

For all the division intersectional conversations have sown, Jones said its ultimate end is equality for all.

“The American ideal and project as it has been formed and inherited is intersectional,” Jones said. “That’s what we have to be in order for that ideal to be realized.”

It remains to be seen how intersectionality within the LGBTQ+ community will play out, whether it will be seen, decades from now, as sparking the kind of vital progress Stonewall or AIDS activism did. Or will it come to be understood as a force that fragmented queer politics and alienated gay white cisgender men, long-considered that movement’s most powerful group? In large part, the answer depends on whether those with more power will step aside and let those with less speak and be heard, and whether they feel they are sharing power rather than losing it.

Gabriel Arana is a gay writer and editor who lives in New York City. He is a contributing editor at The American Prospect and a contributing writer at Salon.